Jacob Griffin Hall

Shapeshifter

The wind gives an off shade of Savannah.Or is it burnt August, a way of conditioning dayto glimpse the dignity of its body? The sun peelsin a skin of ripened blood orange. Lately I’ve notbeen able to decipher the lines between mutualand complementary. For instance, the sky lingersincreasingly black against each stretch of asphalt.My skin burns blue, so long as the light cooperates.The air a moaning gravel beat; the mornings wailand wail. Sharp tire skid, engine switch or a faintrhythmic laughing. In the wind, a subvocalization.Or do I recoil, skip back a step each time my chestloses track of itself? Any crevice is an elegy; the airskirts the edges of lead and blistered bark, loosesits voice through town to stagnant crop, a passivefield, an incantation. I ridge my bones and collapsetwo taut fingers against the crown of my skull, prayto blackwick or rose that evening’s violent mouthtakes only those fractions of fruit that it can suffer.

In Knots

Air clings to skin like sawdust. It’s almost that simple. My lungs touch the world like an ironfilling, a suture, a pile of rust accumulating in someone’s pocket. I’d like winter to be a bone inmy palm that I could take with me anywhere I go. I’m not trying to be impractical. I’m juststanding on a rock in the middle of a creek bed staring at a sky stacked like sand in a bottle.Rose on a skin on a bed of matches. Call it the sun not-quite-rising. It’s just a way of giving into the end of any legacy.

--

I grew up with a willow marking my way into the world.Every morning, it lingered at the base of the driveway like a strangerthat I’d grown too familiar with. It billowed in a bed of ivy,

receded and drew me towards its fluid mass. I’m not sure whenit happened but it consumed everything I thought I was becoming.

--

I don’t need to tell a story I told myself this morningas the mirror shattered my illusion of being an indescribable thing.

There are ways to shed light and there are things I amresponsible for saying. I try too often to take that weightinto the privilege of not suffering for it.

--

I’d like to say that around me in the ankle-deep water there’s a circle of people singing, allslightly off time from each other. I’d like to say that I can’t understand any of their words. Butreally, the morning’s quiet except for the insects and the creek’s drawl against the rocks and thecars passing on the highway behind the trees. I’d like to say that I’m the water and that there’s acircle of people standing in me. A tadpole. A bottle cap. A slit of silver like a flash of light andnot a thing to cut with. And the clouds. Blueblack. They settle into the pit of my stomach andlive there, give back shade to the rise of a sternum.

--

The water strokes my feet as the sun bleeds through the trees and makes a home in my chest.It’s an act of arrest, a puncture that leaves me still-hearted. For a moment my body is a chrysalisas the creek takes a face and gives it back again. I’m caught between the ways that any givenobject varies. I stand in my constituent others and can’t contain them; the water is in knots.I watch as it tangles and loses the thought it came for.

--

For years I did my best to do away with having a best practice.I’d break into half-constructed houses, imagine what it would meanto live there. I’d start small fires and make sure

to put them out before leaving. This was a kind of livingthat didn’t seem to mean anything, until the next kind of living.

--

The wind picks up and the creek seems like it’s rising, but it’s not. I’m trying to listenas carefully as I can, trying to pry one from another like that gesture could give rise to a clear senseof anything. This is a place where willows should come to gather, a place to trace the edges of abody and what its been made to be. A clearing like the face of a sunflower. A thicket betweentwo palms that suggests its own mortality.

--

The first person that I saw die was a stranger and Icouldn’t stomach how intimate it was, seeing the body face downagainst the concrete with the traffic not stopping. The secondwas a friend and the second I saw the body I felt like we’d never met.I started to define myself by the way I saw the peoplearound me, gave up on trying to define them.

--

And so the trees are less than definite. Still on the rock, I keep falling short of the habits I wantto believe in. I’m standing here in a body that I can’t stand to do away with. The light a blistermaking its way into the world. I am a place that I can’t fathom. A bleeding into. A little skip. Arock that dips down below the surface and rises back like heaven. Across the water, there’s awillow shedding petals it can only imagine. I’d like for it all to be that simple. I’d like the sceneto make the best of me even when there’s no reason to.

--

One night, when I was too youngto be out after dark, I went down to the river

with a friend and made a masterpiece of flowers.

We watched it float in the water, skull-white and aching for somethingto leave behind. We talked as the petals began to sink but I forgot about them

even before they were submerged and this became a lessonI could never get away from.

Self-Portrait in Rust

Water defines its conflict on a face of brick,thin furrows, an elemental touch so sustained

morning opens and becomes an antiquity.At the base of the alley wall, a scrap of metal

to that vengeance. We’ve guided Earth’s handto the cold point of a blade, made its surface

a fragile layer of skin. I want to fall througha world that guides the fingers away from that

violence and takes the still-breathing bodyin caress. I want to take my rusted heart out

of the alley and into the home, not to clean itbut to say listen, listen for the ways you can live.

Jacob Griffin Hall was raised outside of Atlanta, Ga and is now a PhD student at the University of Missouri. In the past, he has worked as the assistant poetry editor for the Mid-American Review and he currently works with The Missouri Review. His poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Menacing Hedge, Madcap Review, Santa Ana River Review, Stirring, and elsewhere.

Origins Journal is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non‐profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of Origins Journal must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law.